In a 21 January post on his blog The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah asks whether Barack Obama is
running for re-election as President of the United States or Prime Minister of Israel,
and comments that
A new Obama campaign video makes it increasingly hard to tell, and even
more ominously ratchets further the Israelization of US politics.
Included in the post is the video in question: a 7-minute
YouTube Obama campaign video entitled America
and Israel: an unbreakable bond which
… alternates video and audio of Obama speaking before the Israel lobby,
AIPAC, and other Zionist groups, and clips of Israeli leaders endorsing Obama’s
leadership. It begins and ends with the US flag and the Israeli flag side by
side – thus bringing the Israeli flag directly into the US election campaign.
Although the clips of Israeli leaders … appear to have been taken from
interviews, they are cut to look as if they were provided specifically for the
purpose of endorsing the president.
…
As such, Obama is legitimizing the role of foreign – although certainly
only Israeli leaders – to participate directly in US campaigns. Can we imagine
Obama issuing a video in which he is endorsed as pro-Mexican by the President
of Mexico, or pro-Canadian by Canada’s prime minister? It’s inconceivable.
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 with expectations that he
would establish a new relationship with the Muslim world and bring some balance
to the US relationship with Israel. This was always more of a hope than a
reality. While he made a promising speech in Cairo and broadcast a greeting for
the 2009 Iranian New Year, he surrounded himself with the same old foreign
policy crowd who had spent their lives looking after Israel, and as they say in
business, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve
always got.
Sad to say too that when it comes to matters affecting
Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is both smarter than Obama and more
determined, so by September in Obama’s first year in office I was ready to
declare it all over as far any contest between the two was concerned (see Game,
set and match to Mr Netanyahu).
See Ali Abunimah’s post and the video in question here.